Why The War Will Never End

Nearly half a century after passage of the first Voting Rights
Act, the federal government continues to make and enforce highly specific
rules regarding polling places and ballot make-up -- pretty trivial stuff
against Jim Crow tactics like literacy tests and the all-white primary.
Southern voting officials, marking this astounding progress, would
appreciate the freedom and the trust to carry on unmolested from the
present point.

The government, on the other hand, wants to keep the Waw-uh going
just for the sake, it would seem, of keeping it going. Dig down a bit, of
course, and you strike the real reason. Declaring the war finally
over, and leaving the management of local affairs largely to local people,
would mean renouncing a central purpose of modern federal policy -- to wit,
signaling to blacks and whites and everyone else that the local yokels can't
ever earn their government's trust or indulgence, never mind how they
behave.

The bigness of big government isn't accidental. It stems from big
government's unwillingness ever -- ever -- to lay
aside a power or policy, once taken up. This is singularly bad news to
impart. Worse, it's not even news any more.